My greatest privilege growing up is to have had home-cooked breakfast and dinner almost every day for the 12 years I was going to school. My mother used to say that we would eat her bankrupt. Our family of 3 would inhale 5 people’s worth of weekly groceries, or so the cashier’s expressions always implied.
The home-cooked meal was also something my mother readily held over my head whenever we argued, in the cruel way love sometimes can be manipulated. The threat of no more home-cooked meals again since I was “so keen to become an adult”, was always effective, but never enforced. Instead, when we do reconcile quietly over the wooden dining table, it’s over a meal that she whipped up in the intense and ugly silence of her kitchen. The grudging olive branch. My mother is a cook whose tongue never tasted the shape of “I’m sorry”, but she is a cook and her apologies come in the language she is familiar with.
Only in my junior fall did I manage to step into a kitchen space of my own and began making food for myself. As much as cooking was my mother’s love language, she had a steadfast determination to keep me out of the kitchen. She would hold my hands and wonder at how soft they were, untouched by the labours in the kitchen, the exposure to the moisture, the smell of oil and blood that stays under the fingernails, and admired my hands like it was her pride and joy that finally the tolls of labour ended with her. She was also very protective of the kitchen and did not let the bumbling presence of my brother and I get in the way of her efficient and refined processes. She only taught us enough for us to help – how to clean the bean sprouts, wash the vegetables, clean the dishes – but not enough to stay as she retreats into the kitchen to finish the rest. Thus, I revelled in the new space for myself to learn what food is like. I felt like I was finally starting to understand her.
The kitchen had been an unexpected delight with my dormitory situation this year. It was spacious, and I had finally bit the bullet to invest in all the cooking equipment to last me this year. It was convenient – no more breakfast in the faraway dining hall when I could just wake up and make something for myself while still in pyjamas. It was cathartic – I was cooking for myself now, a revision that gave me agency over the act of service I had laid earnestly at the feet of a man only to be rewarded by pain. Most importantly, it was intimate – it acquainted me with a new way of expressing my care the same way my mother did.
The best part about cooking was cooking for other people. I delighted in being able to cook for my friends and cosplaying a vision of my future, where I had my own house-warming party, and we would enjoy each other’s company over good food and conversation that went past midnight. There is a deeply inexplicable joy in serving up something I worked hard in the kitchen for; seeing the entire life cycle from production to consumption was my way of showing my friends that I cared. I think of the flea poem by John Donn a lot (google it, I think it’s hilarious), about how the speaker delights in the intermingling, and I think the joys of cooking for someone is decidedly NOT like that. It’s not about how something I made is ingested and now part of someone else’s metabolic system. It’s more about the strange affirmation that my food and the accompaniment of my presence is all it takes to bring people together – the pleasure sort of like being a fire at the hearth with the whole family crowded around.
I think that making food together with people is also something incredibly bonding. The division of labour certainly expedites the process, but it is also the chaos, the uneven skill levels, the companionable silence, the friction of learning to fit our differences together… I used to adopt an attitude similar to my mother’s and get frustrated at people for not cooking the right way, and I am really sorry if anyone had to deal with that turf-guarding angst. Now, I would not trade the closeness from quibbling with friends for the solo efficiency of cooking. In my head, I imagine the ideal date to end on the intimately domestic note of cooking a meal together. The kitchen bonds people with both its process and its products.
That said, I am not immune to the possessiveness over the kitchen as my territory. Having my own kitchen is a deceptive claim – I am after all sharing it with my roommate. Many around me have witnessed how the endowment of a kitchen made me a lot less agreeable to my roommate’s follies. My friends had to put up with my peeved rants about the poor hygiene, stacking dirty dishes, and general ignorance about cooking that my roommate had subjected me to (she didn’t know how to use a gas operated stove and kept the spark ignition on the whole time she was cooking her instant noodles, sorry I couldn’t help myself). It made me realise the fundamental truth that love and attachment, even to spaces, can often generate dysfunction.
Sometimes I wonder if cooking is the critical difference that explains food wastage. I look upon the tray returns at my dining hall and regard the food waste with contempt. Let it be known that I will judge you for leaving your plate half eaten and untouched. I think the people who leave ungodly amounts of food out of consideration that perhaps the trash might be hungry simply have never cooked for themselves. To render food well is a non-existent skill in college dining halls, but only those who cook forgive mediocre food in light of the effort to at least render it edible and put it upon our plates.
Cooking has now become one of my love languages, and I fully plan on cooking more next semester. Having a kitchen made me reflect about myself and my own upbringing and has been one of the things I’m grateful for this year. To round off this post, I’m going to brainstorm for the ideal meal I would cook for my family when I go back to Singapore – it’s a pity that they have never tried my cooking properly before:
Shrimp Fried Rice
Century Egg and Tofu Salad
Seafood Bone Broth and Cabbage
Roasted Pork Rib
Chicken Curry Stew
Dessert – tbd, will have to experiment with making some
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